Beatrice and Benedick (17 page)

The cries of
Viva Maria!
rang out from the crowds in a deafening chant. Archers with golden bows shot flowers at the tower and passed up a bunch of white roses to be conveyed all the way to Hero. The little maid looked more comely than I had ever seen her in her blue robe and white wimple with a chaplet of flowers about her forehead, her dark hair rippling below the headdress almost to her knees, roses blooming in her cheeks too. You could see, then, the promise to come. In her hand she held a red crystal heart, the Sacred Heart, I supposed, of Christ.

With the momentum great gilded wheels with the sun and moon set upon their axles began to turn. The ever-decreasing circular platforms of the whole contraption began to revolve sickeningly, contrariwise with the motion of the machine. The heavenly bodies and planets and stars revolved like an orrery and this complication of superstitious whirligigs rendered the poor little apostles squeamish. Some of them fell asleep, many of them puked most grievously, and some did still worse: but these unseemly emissions did not seem to affect the edification of the people. Little St James, who seemed to be the direst case, was simply passed down to his mother in the crowd.

I could not leave Claudio yet, and I could not have my talk with Beatrice with him at hand, but I manoeuvred us in the procession so I could keep her in sight. As we reached the harbour and curved round to the golden statue, following in the path of the archbishop's blood, we stopped at last and seemed to wait once more. For there was more to come.

As we watched, two giants rolled down the hill towards us. For one foolish moment I thought they were real; but then I saw that they were huge constructions on wheels – two horses as vast as the horse of Troy, one white, one black, carrying riders. Riders made of wood, painted and varnished.

The white horse carried a white lady, with a blue dress with gold curlicues on the stomacher and a white apron at the skirts. She had a crown made of the towers of a citadel on her head. The black horse carried a Moor in Roman armour with a scarlet cloak about his shoulders and a laurel wreath of victory upon his head. Their coming was eerie – they must have moved upon wheels but they seemed to float, the noise of their machinery inaudible above the hubbub of the crowd. It was as if two huge leviathans had forsaken their unsounded deeps to ride upon the sands.

As they drew closer the crowd grew quieter. I looked about me and drew Claudio nearer – there was an uneasy atmosphere once again, as the people of Messina looked upon the giants, the black man and the white lady staring forward with their varnished faces, implacable. Then someone shouted
‘Matamoros!'
I looked around – I thought I recognised the voice; it belonged to an ensign in Don Pedro's company. Others took up the shout; all Spaniards, for the word they shouted was a Spanish word. I had heard it before; it was a name they had given as a badge of honour to their patron St James the Great. Matamoros; Kill the Moor.

From behind us the regiment began to throw missiles at the black rider. They arced over us like arrows; fallen lemons, sticks. And then stones.

‘Let's go,' I hissed to Claudio, and pulled him back towards the church door. The archbishop, dressed now in his chasuble and finery, stood there in the duomo's porch watching the trouble, with eyes empty of tears and surprise. I knew in an instant he had done this. I thrust Claudio at him. ‘Take him in,' I commanded, caring not for his rank. He nodded once and took his nephew under his arm. I waited till they all went within and barred the doors, as if they knew the storm was coming.

I dashed back to the fray with only one thought – Beatrice. Now people were screaming and running. There was an angry,
seething crowd about the legs of the plaster Moor's wooden horse and still they were screaming the word
Matamoros!
The horse was rocking and would soon be toppled. I looked at the Vara beyond it; the children were already jumping down to safety in the arms of their mothers. I came face to face with Beatrice.

For a moment I held her in a beautiful firm embrace, as relief flooded me, and as we parted I read the same relief on her face, to be chased away by panic. ‘Benedick,' she said, and my own name seemed the sweetest word in the lexicon at that moment. But she pointed. ‘Hero!'

I turned; saw at once. The Vara was rocking precariously, the paper planets tumbling down as if the universe had ended. Hero, clinging to her perch, was losing her grip, her chaplet of roses awry and her cheeks streaked with tears. As if time had slowed, the painted Moor and his horse toppled over to be broken and trampled and spat upon by the Aragonese. Beatrice was still by my side but I thrust her away from me. ‘Get out of this,' I said. ‘I will find you.'

I did not expect her to obey and nor she did, but stood and watched in the screaming chaos as Hero toppled from the right hand of Christ and dropped like a stone. The girl landed in my arms, winding me, but Beatrice was there to fetch us up. I dragged them, one on each arm, to the cathedral porch and pounded at the studded doors. Hero was safely conveyed to her uncle and aunt, and I would have pressed Beatrice within too, but she tugged my hand.

Wordlessly, we went back into the fray. Hand in hand we walked through the chaos. The Moor was shattered into dust, the black plaster chipped from his face – he was now white. In opposition, as if to redress some balance of opposing forces, the sky darkened into dusk. The fireworks burst overhead, and I wondered what there was to celebrate. The Vara contraption lay on its side, and the townsfolk were cutting the great ropes
into little pieces with their wicked knives and handing the hemp around to the pullers and bowmen. This may have been a custom with them but now it just seemed of a piece with the general anarchy. I followed Beatrice out of the madness and as I left the thoroughfare I felt a crunch underfoot.

The red crystal Sacred Heart lay shattered in the archbishop's congealed blood.

Beatrice:
I could not stop the tears from sliding down my cheeks as I stumbled down the shoreline in the direction of the Moor's house.

I was certain that the poet and his family were in danger, that the mob I had just seen would not differentiate between past and present tenant and that the house had once been the home of the murderous Moor would be enough for them to burn the place to the ground.

I scrambled through the cacti and my dress tore a little; prickly fruits were knocked to the ground and I trod them underfoot, smelling their cloying sweet flesh. In my haste my hand had broken from Signor Benedick's but I knew he still followed me, for now and again he called my name. The word sounded so lovely on his lips it was snatched and blown away by the jealous zephyr. I tasted salt on my lips; my tears and the sea spray were one. The field of stars overhead made the night as bright as day, shining in their thousands like the crystals of Egyptian blue.

I blinked the tears away in an effort to see the house ahead; but it was all right, only the lamp burned in the study window. Giovanni Florio Crollalanza was no doubt at his pamphlets – no torches touched the timbers, no stones broke the quarrels, no angry citizens wielded their moonlight daggers. The silver sea was calm and flat as a looking glass, the tide whispered in in intervals, and the hubbub from the town sounded no louder here than the waves.

At the dunes I collapsed into the sand where I had sat yesterday disputing with the poet. Benedick knelt before me, and touched one of the tears on my cheek. ‘Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?'

‘Yes, and I have tears enough to rival the stars in number.'

‘But your cousin is safe,' he assured me.

Yes, and he had saved her. ‘How much might the man deserve of me that righted her!' I clasped the finger that had touched the teardrop. I could not explain the real reason for my tears; the Moor's horse falling, the plaster Moor, his face stoved in, blanched by violence, and let go of the finger. ‘But there are other wrongs here to be righted.'

‘Is there any way to show such friendship?' His kneeling posture turned him supplicant. ‘May a man do it?'

I thought of the poet. ‘It is a man's office, but not yours.'

He rose, so precipitately that sand flew into my skirts, suddenly angry. ‘Then whose? That scribbler?'

I sat under the benign stars, their light doubling and trebling through the lens of my tears. They seemed to be falling. I did not hear the danger in his voice. ‘He knew. He knew how it would be. He told me here, on this very spot, just yesterday.'

I looked at Benedick's angry, shuttered face, the angles of it sharp in the moonlight. How could I explain that a fortnight earlier, I would have thrilled to sit here with him, back when I had wanted, so much, a Moor of my own. That the poet had been helping me to write a sonnet, for him, which expressed exactly what I wanted to say? That I had wanted to give it to him, here, tonight, on these dunes? But now it had all turned sour, for the Moor's crime against nature had shaken the constellations, and ruptured the ordained orbit of my life too.

Yet if the poet was right this had all started well before, with the massacre of Ramiro of Asturias centuries ago, with the heavenly connivance of St James the Moor-slayer – St James
Matamoros
– and the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and from Sicily. Now it was ended, this whole sorry history of the Moors in Sicily – the last living Moor had gone, slain by his own hand, and even the plaster Moor Grifone, that colossus of the Ascension parade, was utterly vanquished. The play was over; and it was a tragedy, defined by its ending. Sun and day and love had turned to night and dark and murder, and I wish the planets could be turned and we could revolve once again into day, but I did not know how that might be achieved.

I thought Benedick was the answer. I had brought him here because I had thought him, somehow, the key to this celestial reversal. I had once thought him a jester or a fool, the personification of mirth, but now he looked as furious as the mob. ‘Who said these things?' He knelt again, but in dominance this time, not submission, and laid his hands upon my shoulders. ‘You talked with a man, here, yesterday?'

I sighed – I owed him the truth, even though I knew it would anger him. ‘It was the poet. Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza. His house is there.' I pointed to the light beyond the cacti.

He released my shoulders and turned to look at the window, as if he could not trust himself. ‘And now, you were running to
him
? That is the right of it, isn't it?'

‘No,' I protested. ‘I mean, yes. But not like that. I wanted to warn him.'

‘Warn him of what?'

I thought of all Michelangelo had said of the Spanish, of Benedick's friends. ‘I cannot say.'

‘You have your
secrets,
then,' he spat.

Worse and worse. ‘Do not believe me; and yet, I do not lie …' I was babbling, but Benedick was so tied to the affair, so complicit in it all – bound to Don Pedro by those inexorable bonds of brotherhood and friendship, tied to St James the Moor-slayer by reason of the medal he still wore around his neck. What if I told him of the poet's suspicions and he ran back to his
brother-prince? I thought speedily and told a half-truth. ‘We spoke of love. What else do poets know?'

He came to me then, his eyes dark with something indefinable. I thought him angry, but then he took my hands. ‘I may not have the simpering syllables of Monsieur Love,' he whispered fervently, ‘I can only speak like an honest man and a soldier. But I can speak of love too.' He took a breath as if he would plunge into five fathoms. ‘
I do love nothing in the world so well as you.
'

There it was. He had done the impossible. He had turned the world around. I was suddenly shining in the firmament with the dayspring, overflowing with joy. ‘Why, then, God forgive me!' I exclaimed. ‘I was about to protest I loved you.'

Then suddenly his lips were on mine, our bodies pressed together. The fire in the sky was between us now, descended from the celestial to the mortal, it was burning in our hearts, twin coals. We kissed until we could not breathe, and collapsed on the sand, side by side, hands entwined. The stars glittered just for us. I blinked back at them, unable to believe such happiness; and saw then, brighter than them all, the crooked constellation that was most dear to me. I pointed. ‘There, do you see? That group of five stars, shaped like a double V?'

He followed my finger with his gaze. ‘Yes.'

‘That is Cassiopeia's chair. And there is a sixth star, see, at the bottom.'

‘I see it,' he said. ‘It is smaller than the rest, and brighter.'

‘That is because it is young – it is not even a score of years old.'

He leaned on his elbow, and looked at me indulgently. ‘How do you know?'

‘It is my star,' I said. ‘It was born when I was born.'

He began to kiss my throat, small, fluttering kisses like butterflies, so sweet that they made it difficult to speak. ‘Explain.'

‘My mother bore me in her chamber, at the top of our castle's tower. As she laboured, she looked on the stars for comfort, and she told me that at the very second of my birth, that new star danced into being, lighting up like a candle flame. I always thought it her fancy, but claimed the star for my own. It was something we shared, even when she died.' The little kisses stopped; resumed again. ‘Then I came here, and our own Friar Francis, who is something of an astronomer, told me she spoke truly; the star was a
stella nova,
born on November 11th just like me.' I sighed like the zephyr, happily now. Benedick was the first person save the friar I had told about the star. The star had been mine and my mother's; I had not told my father, nor yet my brother. But now, at last, I had someone to tell, someone who loved me. ‘Its proper name is Tycho's Supernova, but I prefer to think of it as a diamond set into Cassiopeia's chair,' I smiled at the skies, ‘a fitting ornament for the goddess who boasted of her unrivalled beauty.'